Sam Ogbemi Daibo
For decades, the relationship between companies and their host communities in Nigeria has largely been defined by projects.
A company builds a classroom, renovates a health centre, provides boreholes, awards scholarships or rehabilitates a road. These interventions can be valuable. They meet real needs and often improve lives. But after decades of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), we must ask a harder question: have these projects created communities that are economically stronger, institutionally capable and increasingly able to sustain their own development? Too often, the answer is no.
Nigeria’s next development challenge is therefore not simply to do more CSR. It is to move beyond CSR—from delivering community projects to investing in community systems. The distinction matters.
A project asks: What can we build for this community? Community investment asks: What can we build with this community that strengthens its institutions, expands economic opportunity and continues creating value long after the intervention ends? That shift changes everything.
From Beneficiaries to Development Partners
The Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) presents an important opportunity to rethink this relationship in Nigeria’s oil- and gas-producing communities. Through Host Community Development Trusts (HCDTs), the PIA provides a framework for communities to participate more systematically in identifying and advancing their development priorities. But establishing HCDTs is only the beginning. Their long-term value will depend on whether they become credible, accountable and capable institutions for community development. That requires more than funding projects. It requires strong governance, participatory planning, accountability, evidence-based decision-making and sustained collaboration among communities, operators, regulators and other stakeholders.
This lesson has been reinforced through PIND’s work with HCDTs under the Bridges Project. The experience points to a simple but important conclusion: the real value of an HCDT should not be measured only by the projects it funds, but by its ability to govern resources responsibly, engage its stakeholders, track results and make increasingly strategic development investments. As the Bridges Project concludes, one question has become particularly important: what happens after the project ends? It is a question that should be asked of every corporate-community intervention in Nigeria.
Build Economies, Not Just Infrastructure
Community investment also requires us to rethink what successful development looks like. A vocational training centre is useful. But its value multiplies when training responds to market demand, employers participate, graduates can access finance and businesses have customers. A solar mini-grid provides electricity. But when that electricity powers enterprises, increases productivity and creates opportunities for local service providers, it becomes part of a local economic system. Agricultural support becomes more sustainable when farmers are connected to processors, finance, technology and reliable markets rather than receiving inputs year after year.
The objective should not be for communities to permanently wait for the next corporate intervention. It should be communities with stronger institutions and local economies capable of attracting investment, creating livelihoods and sustaining development. That requires a fundamental change in mindset: from companies as providers and communities as beneficiaries, to companies and communities as development partners.
New Compact for Corporate-community Relations
This principle extends far beyond oil and gas. As investment expands across mining, agriculture, renewable energy, manufacturing and infrastructure, Nigeria needs a new compact between businesses and the communities in which they operate.
For companies, this is not philanthropy dressed in new language. Strong local economies, trusted institutions and constructive community relationships can contribute to more stable and sustainable operating environments. For communities, it means moving beyond one-off benefits towards institutions, capabilities and economic opportunities that endure. For government and regulators, it means encouraging long-term community value rather than measuring success simply by the number of projects completed. And for development organisations, it requires recognising that our greatest legacy may not be the projects we leave behind, but the systems, capabilities and relationships that continue to function after we leave.
At the Bridges Project Impact Summit, stakeholders are being challenged to answer three questions: What changed? What was learned? What happens next? That final question is perhaps the most important because sustainability begins when ownership outlives intervention.
From Projects to Prosperity
Nigeria will continue to need schools, roads, health facilities, water systems and other community infrastructure. The argument is not that companies should stop building projects. It is that projects should become building blocks of stronger community systems—not the final measure of development.
So perhaps the question companies should ask is no longer: What project can we give this community? But: What can we invest in together that will make this community stronger long after we are gone?
That is the shift from CSR to community investment. And it may be one of the most important shifts Nigeria can make in moving communities from being recipients of development to owners of their prosperity.
.Sam Daibo is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND).